Currently, many message boards and forums exist online. For example, Raging Bull is a popular message board where investors can post their thoughts about the prospects of various stocks. SlashDot.org is a forum where members can post their thoughts about technology issues, and rate the posts of others. Particularly useful is SlashDot's capability of filtering, or ordering, posts based on how other readers subjectively scored or liked the posts. Unfortunately, the method of collaborative filtering employed by Slashdot, and by many other sites, relies on subjective judgment, after the fact. That is, readers spend time reading a post and then some of them offer subjective judgments as to quality or how much they liked or disliked the post.
Although somewhat useful, there are inherent inefficiencies and deficiencies in these conventional methods. First, many people will read a posting but not everyone rates the posting. This means that a few people with strong opinions (and possibly a single or a few people with multiple user identities or IDs) can bias the system by rating early and often. Second, many people still have to search and/or wade through poor quality information that has limited or no quality ratings while waiting for the information to be scored by others. Third, the “quality” of a post is very subjective. In general, what one person may think of as being useful, another person may classify or rate as useless or junk. Most sites do not have rigorous criteria for making objective quality ratings or even subjective quality ratings. Even if these rigorous criteria were added, such criteria would be time consuming to learn and apply and would likely reduce user participation. Any enforcement of the criteria would also be difficult or impossible to implement in practical terms. Thus, the current state-of-the-art is a relatively crude filtering capability that is subjective at best, that can be applied only after a post or submission has been written, and that works (if at all) by shifting the burden of quality control to the users of a web site or other interactive or on-line forum.
No known on-line sites, message boards, plural user contributed or other forums or the like are known that use or have a capability of filtering posts or contributions, in advance, based on the reputation of the poster or contributor especially of sites, message boards, and/or forums where there are a plurality of posters or contributors other than for example a site, message board, or forum administrator or originator.
A major difficulty in constructing such a system to date has been the challenge of obtaining reliable and objective information on the quality of posters or contributors. As mentioned above, a site like SlashDot necessarily relies on the subjective judgment of their readers to assign scores. Other sites that have quality rating systems (e.g., the on-line auction site Ebay) also typically rely on subjective user ratings. When raters know that they too will be rated (as for example on Ebay) the “reputations” become even less reliable since people are reluctant to give poor ratings for fear they will receive negative ratings in retaliation. Furthermore, since many posters are one-time posters or infrequent posters, it is often impossible to reliably predict even the subjective quality of posts in advance. There simply aren't enough data points to create a reliable trend in most cases.
Briefly then, conventional systems and methods in use today in the Internet and on-line posting domain is the filtering of posts based on subjective quality ratings of the posts, and no apparent attempt to filter posts based on an objective quality metric of the poster. In the user reputation domain, we see Ebay-like subjective commentaries or evaluations (not objective reputations) that are usually inflated and not very useful (and not reliable in any event) until many data points (e.g., many transactions) have been established.